Nokia’s Symbian^3 and new Smartphone’s strategy

They have therefore started to reposition and have created the foundations of a solid association between mobile services and mobile handsets. This vision will now be reinforced with Symbian^3, but even more so with the work being put in to attract developers.

To do this, the Finnish group has made numerous announcements through the Nokia Developer Summit, getting directly involved in the distribution and management of applications on the Ovi Store. The applications are now run through a new statistics tools, the applications signature process will soon be lightened, and In-App Purchase function will be added.

A structured development environment
During Nokia World, an emphasis was made on development environment coherence - promising application creators methods to easily develop for the full range of Nokia handsets ranging from Symbian S60 models, the new Symbian^3 range and future MeeGo products.

The use of a common Qt environment (which has just moved to version 4.7), allows the development of applications which are globally compatible in one go. It is also possible to create Symbian applications using simple Web languages which don’t require any particular knowledge or mastery of tools.

Finally, at the third and most basic level, the App Wizard has been designed and released to everyone so that small applets can be created in just a few clicks.

Relaunching the Ovi Store portal
For the end user, the most noticeable difference is the Ovi Store portals renovation which was announced during Nokia World, allowing for simpler and more intuitive use with greater possibilities offered to discover, and allow to be discovered, new applications through increased visibility.

Despite Nokia’s strong presence in the market, the Ovi Store, on wanting to be able to compete on many levels with other portals, has been left behind by the competition. But Nokia has promised that they will now make up for this with the release of Symbian^3 and a developers strategy in place. The Finnish group is also looking at a regional approach for their portal, with local content adapted to targeted markets.

Nokia also made their ambitions known: take back their place as leader in Smartphones (which is being contested primarily with Samsung and Apple), seduce partners by offering to share generated revenue and make application development easier. But to do this, their mobile handsets need to convince consumers...